Headspace Studios.

Hi, welcome to Radio Headspace Space. I'm Dora, and I'm so glad that you're here.

Over the last few years, I've been sitting with a kind of grief.

I didn't really have the language for at first.

It's the anticipatory grief of watching my mom get older,

especially after I moved away from home to pursue my career.

Now, I know logically that this is just part of life. Everyone ages and

everyone changes. But the thing about aging is that it often happens so subtly, that you don't

really notice it until you do, especially when it's happening to the people that you love.

For me, that moment came when my mom first came to visit me in L.A., not longer after I'd moved

to the States. I remember being so excited to see her, counting down the days, imagining

our time together, thinking about the things and places I wanted to show her, counting down the days, imagining our time together, thinking about the things and places

I wanted to show her. And then I saw her, and something in me sunk.

I remember listening to a podcast on grief, and the expert had described grief as a behavioral

response, how our sense of time, space, and closeness becomes disoriented when we lose someone.

Their absence in our lives creates this deep sense of longing and yearning, a reaching for

what used to be. This made me wonder, what happens when the person that we're grieving is still alive?

What happens when that loss isn't about death, it's about change, about distance,

about how a relationship looks different, or no longer looks and feels the same, or the realization

that the people we love won't always be here, or won't always be here in the ways we know.

I've been noticing how much our grief is shaped by an unspoken assumption,

that love comes with guarantees,

...